AFTERWORD
A few months after this piece was published, I wrote another article for Prospect in which I said I was making an effort to improve my German. The reason I gave – somewhat but not wholly tongue-in-cheek – was that I was ‘ashamed to be English’, mostly because of the xenophobia that drove the Brexit vote, but also because of the poor language skills of my nation.
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*1 This essay releases a long-buzzing bee from my bonnet. Exasperation finally led me to publish it in Prospect, August 2016. The editors, as editors often do, shortened it somewhat. Here is the unabridged version.
*2 Yesterday I had lunch with an erudite classical scholar, who intrigued me by saying that, although he can read Latin and Greek exactly as fast and fluently as English, he is incapable of holding a conversation in either of those ancient languages. He can’t understand spoken Latin, because the continuous stream of phonemes elides words which, on paper, are separated by spaces. He added that he has the same problem with French, and attributes it, as do I, to being taught modern languages in the same way as British schools have always taught Latin.
*3 My Kipling hommage was one of the cuts made by Prospect. As I explained in the essay on ‘Universal Darwinism’ (see this page above), the mistaken idea of inheritance of acquired characteristics is a central plank of the Lamarckian theory. I’ve sometimes toyed with the idea of writing a Darwinian version of the Just So Stories, but I doubt that I (or indeed anyone other than Kipling) could pull it off. Don’t be confused here by the fact that some biologists have used ‘Just So Stories’ as a pejorative for retrospective Darwinian rationalizations of natural phenomena. Those authors were emphasizing a different aspect of Kipling’s explanations: the fact that they are retrospective. My point – that they are Lamarckian – is a separate one.
*4 As Steven Pinker, in The Language Instinct, reminds us, tiny children are linguistic geniuses at an age when they can’t tie their own shoelaces.
*5 And German film-makers do it extremely well, as I am discovering in my campaign to improve my German by watching dubbed films that I already know very well in English, such as Jeeves und Wooster, and Das Leben des Brian.
*6 Indeed, after I wrote that sentence I chanced to meet socially an extremely senior BBC executive and he said it in almost exactly the same words. I shamelessly made my pitch. I met him again some months later, and he told me he’d taken it to heart and was hoping to do something about it. He seemed to think it would require some kind of technical wizardry to produce subtitles quickly. I’m sceptical about that because, as I pointed out above, most TV news footage consists of rolling repeats, allowing plenty of time for subtitles to be produced by human translators.
If I ruled the world…
HOW OFTEN DO we petulantly mutter something equivalent to: ‘If I ruled the world, I’d…’ Yet when an editor offers you the same self-indulgence out of the blue,*1 the mind goes blank. Frivolous answers are easy enough to reel off: ban chewing gum, baseball caps and burqas, and equip all trains with mobile-phone jammers. But such pettiness is unworthy of the editor’s generosity. How about the other extreme, the utopian, pie-in-the-sky decree of universal happiness, and abolishing starvation, crime, poverty, disease and religion? Too unrealistic. So here’s a manageably modest yet still worthwhile ambition: if I ruled the world, I would downgrade rulebooks and replace them, wherever possible, with humane, intelligent discretion.
I’m writing this on a plane, having just passed through security at Heathrow. A nice young mother was distraught because she wasn’t allowed to take on board a tub of ointment for her little girl’s eczema. The security man was polite but firm. She wasn’t even permitted to spoon a reduced quantity into a smaller jar. I couldn’t grasp what was wrong with that suggestion, but the rules were unbendable. The official offered to fetch his supervisor, who came and was equally polite, but she too was bound by the rulebook’s hoops of steel.*2
There was nothing I could do, and it was no help that I recommended a website where a chemist explains, in delightfully comedic detail, what it would actually take to manufacture a workable bomb from binary liquid ingredients, labouring for several hours in the aircraft loo, using copious quantities of ice in relays of champagne coolers helpfully passed through the door by the cabin staff.
The prohibition against taking more than very small quantities of liquids or unguents on planes is demonstrably ludicrous. It started as one of those ‘Look at us, we’re taking decisive action’ displays, the ones designed to cause maximum inconvenience to the public just to make the dimwitted dundridges*3 who rule our lives feel important and look busy.
It’s the same with having to take our shoes off (another gem of official wally-hood that must have had Bin Laden chuckling victoriously into his beard) – and all those other exercises in belated stable-door shutting. But let me get to the general principle. Rulebooks are themselves put together by human judgements. Often bad ones, but in any case judgements made by humans who were probably no wiser or better qualified to make them than the individuals who subsequently have to put them into practice out in the real world.
No sane person, witnessing that scene at the airport, seriously feared this woman was planning to blow herself up on a plane. The fact that she was accompanied by children gave us the first clue. Supporting evidence trickled in from the brazen visibility of her face and hair, from her lack of a Quran, prayer mat or big black beard and, finally, from the absurdity of the notion that her tub of ointment could, in a million years, be magicked into a high explosive – certainly not in the cramped facilities afforded by an aircraft loo. The security official and his supervisor were human beings who obviously wished they could behave decently, but they were powerless: stymied by a rulebook. Nothing but an object, which, because it is made of paper and unalterable ink rather than of flexible human brain tissue, is incapable of discretion, compassion or humanity.
This is just a single example and it may seem trivial. But I am sure that you, dear reader, can list half a dozen similar cases from your own experience.*4 Talk to any doctor or nurse, and hear their frustration with having to spend a substantial proportion of their time filling in forms and ticking boxes. Who sincerely thinks that is a good use of expert, valuable time; time that could be spent caring for patients? No human being, surely – not even a lawyer. Only a mindless book of rules.
How often does a criminal walk free on a ‘technicality’? Perhaps the arresting officer fluffed his lines when delivering the official caution. Decisions that will gravely affect a person’s life can turn on the powerlessness of a judge to exercise discretion and reach the conclusion that every single person in the court, often even including the accused and his defence lawyer, knows is just.
It isn’t as simple as this, of course. Discretion can be abused, and rulebooks are important safeguards against that. But the balance has shifted too far in the direction of an obsessive reverence for rules. There must be ways to reintroduce intelligent discretion and overthrow the unbending tyranny of going by the book without opening the door to abuse. If I ruled the world, I would make it my business to find them.*5
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*1 The editors of Prospect magazine conceived the idea of commissioning a number of writers to muse on the title ‘If I ruled the world…’ My contribution was published in March 2011.
*2 I later had a similar experience myself, when I tried to take a tiny jar of what was obviously honey on a plane. Unfortunately my tweet on the subject was widely interpreted as a selfish grumble about my own precious honey, as opposed to the altruism of my concern for the young mother with the ointment. Actually, in both cases I was making a general point, an altruistic point – the very point, indeed, of this essay. I don’t eat honey, by the way.
*3 This is a word I am grooming for – as I hope – eventual inclusion in the Oxford English Dictionary. I coined it from a Tom Sharpe novel, Blott on the Landscape, brilliantly adapted by Malcolm Bradbury for the BBC, starring Geral
dine James, David Suchet and George Cole. One of the characters, ‘J. Dundridge’, was an epitome of the humourless, rule-following bureaucrat. In order to qualify for inclusion in the OED, a new coining such as ‘dundridge, noun’ has to be used a significant number of times without definition or attribution. My footnote violates the requirement but the article in Prospect didn’t, so I hope it counts. There’s already a good word, ‘jobsworth’, which means the same thing, but I prefer the sound of ‘dundridge’.
*4 An eight-year-old boy of my acquaintance begged his parents to let him join them in running a 10-kilometre race. They demurred, agreeing with the rulebook that he was too young. However, he was so disappointed that they agreed to let him start, assuming that he would honourably drop out early during the race and one of them would drop out with him. In the event, he didn’t drop out but kept up with his father all the way, and beat his mother – no slouch herself. But when he reached the finishing line, the officials wouldn’t let him cross it. He was under the age limit, and was made to go round the side. Maybe they should have pulled him out on the starting line. But to do that to a child in his moment of triumph as he reached the finishing line was – well – stable doors and bolting horses come to mind again.
*5 Another example of officials playing by the rulebook, although a moment of reflection would have shown them how ridiculous it was, is the story concerning my uncle Colyear Dawkins and the Oxford station barrier: see the Afterword to my eulogy to my Uncle Bill on this page.
VI
THE SACRED TRUTH OF NATURE
THE TITLE OF THIS SECTION echoes a comment in the volume’s opening essay: for scientists, ‘there is something almost sacred about nature’s truth’. There, the context was the sanctity of truth in science; here, I use the phrase to herald a group of pieces celebrating that truth expressed in actuality, through observation of the glories and complexities of the natural world. At its core are two essays that take their texts from that richest of ecological hotspots, the ultimate place of pilgrimage for the ardent Darwinian: the Galápagos Islands.
We begin, though, not on an equatorial beach but in high abstraction, with the concept of time, as addressed in a lecture opening an exhibition ‘About time’. This and the closing piece of the section share a lyrical, even elegiac reflectiveness, punctuated by an affectionate delight in the quirks and oddities of the natural world, the ridiculously fascinating and fascinatingly ridiculous – such as the Pacific Palolo worm, which engages in communal self-amputation for breeding purposes, or the amnesiacally flightless kakapo, launching itself in ambitious panic from a tree and collapsing in a heap on the floor.
The theme of time continues into the two ‘tales’ that follow – their titles recalling the constituent parts of that most inventive and encyclopedic of Richard’s works, The Ancestor’s Tale. These were written on a trip to the islands in 2005, and are infused with the pilgrim’s delight in this richly surreal Arcadia. Around the eponymous central figure of each – the giant tortoise, the turtle – are woven discussions of life’s twisting journey from water to land (and sometimes back again) over the unimaginable expanses of geological time.
The section concludes with a foreword to a wonderful book celebrating this fragile paradise and the fragility of the wider world’s biodiversity: a revised edition of Last Chance to See by Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine. If this essay has a melancholic tone about it, that is hardly surprising. Not only is the book for which it was written itself an elegy for vanishing species driven to the edge of extinction, but at the time of its composition the writer, along with countless others, was still mourning the untimely death of Douglas Adams – humorist, humanist, celebrator of science – at the tragically young age of forty-nine. This is both a paean to the priceless riches of our living planet and a threnody for a priceless human being.
G.S.
About time*1
TIME IS PRETTY mysterious stuff – almost as elusive and hard to pin down as conscious awareness itself. It seems to flow – ‘like an ever-rolling stream’ – but what is it that does the flowing? We have the feeling that the present is the only instant of time that actually exists. The past is a shadowy memory, the future a vague uncertainty. Physicists don’t see it like that. The present has no privileged status in their equations. Some modern physicists have gone so far as to describe the present as an illusion, a product of the observer’s mind.
For poets, time is anything but an illusion. They hear its wingèd chariot hurrying near; they aspire to leave footprints on the sands of it; wish there was more of it – to stand and stare; invite it to put up its caravan, just for one day. Proverbs declare procrastination to be the thief of it; or they compute, with improbable precision, the ratio of stitches saved in it. Archeologists excavate rose-red cities half as old as it. Pub landlords announce it gentlemen please. We waste it, spend it, eke it out, squander it, kill it.
Long before there were clocks or calendars, we – indeed all animals and plants – measured out our lives by the cycles of astronomy. By the wheeling of those great clocks in the sky: the rotation of the Earth on its axis, the rotation of the Earth around the sun, and the rotation of the moon around the Earth.
By the way, it’s surprising how many people think the Earth is closer to the sun in summer than in winter. If this were really so, Australians would have their winter at the same time as ours. A glaring example of such Northern Hemisphere chauvinism was the science-fiction story in which a group of space travellers, far out in some distant star system, waxed nostalgic for the home planet: ‘Just to think that it’s spring back on Earth!’
The third great clock in our sky, the orbiting of the moon, exerts its effects on living creatures mostly via the tides. Many sea creatures order their lives according to a lunar calendar. The Pacific Palolo worm, Palolo viridis or Eunice viridis, lives in crevices of coral reefs. In the early mornings of two particular days during the last quarter of the moon in October, the rear ends of all the worms simultaneously break off and swim to the surface for a breeding frenzy. These are remarkable rear ends. They even have their own pair of eyes.
The same thing happens twenty-eight days later, in the last quarter of the November moon. So predictable is the timing that the islanders know exactly when to go out in their canoes and gather up the squirming rear ends of Palolo worms, which are a prized delicacy.
Notice that the Palolo worms achieve their synchrony not by simultaneously responding to a particular signal from the sky. Rather, each worm independently integrates cycles registered over many lunar cycles. They all do the same sums on the same data, so like good scientists they all come to the same conclusion and break off their rear ends simultaneously.
A similar story could be told of plants synchronizing their flowering seasons by integrating successively measured changes in day length. Many birds time their breeding seasons in the same way. This is easily demonstrated by experiments using artificial lights put on and off by time-switches to simulate artificial day-lengths appropriate to different times of the year.
Most animals and plants – probably all living cells – have internal clocks buried deep in their biochemistry. These biological clocks manifest themselves in all kinds of physiological and behavioural rhythms. You can measure them in dozens of different ways. They are linked to the external astronomical clocks, and normally synchronized to them. But the interesting thing is that if the biological clocks are separated from the outside world, they carry on regardless. They truly are internal clocks. Jet-lag is the discomfort we experience when our own internal clocks are being reset by the external Zeitgeber*2 after a major shift of longitude.
Longitude is, of course, intimately linked with time. John Harrison’s winning solution to the great longitude competition of the eighteenth century was nothing more than a clock that stayed accurate even when taken to sea. Migrating birds, too, make use of their own internal clocks for similar navigational purposes.
Here’s a lovely example of an intern
al clock. As you know, worker bees have a code with which they tell fellow hive members where they have found food. The code is a figure-of-eight dance, which they perform on the vertical comb inside the hive. There is a straight run in the middle of the figure of eight, whose direction conveys the direction of the food. Since the dance is performed on the vertical comb, whereas the angle of the food is in the horizontal plane, there has to be a convention. The convention is that the upward direction on the comb in the vertical plane stands for the sun’s direction in the horizontal plane. A dance with a straight run straight up the comb tells the other bees to leave the hive and fly dead towards the sun. A dance with the straight run 30° to the right of the vertical on the comb tells the other bees: Leave the hive and fly at an angle 30° to the right of the sun.
Well, that is remarkable enough, and when Karl von Frisch first discovered it, many people found it hard to believe. But it is true.*3 And it gets even better, and this brings us back to the sense of time. There’s a problem with using the sun as a reference point. It moves. Or rather, since the Earth spins, the sun appears to move (from left to right in the Northern Hemisphere), as the day advances. How do the bees cope?
Von Frisch tried the experiment of trapping his bees in his observation hive for several hours. They went on dancing. But he noticed something which really is almost too good to be true. As the hours advanced, the dancing bees slowly turned the direction of the straight run of their dance, so that it would continue to tell the truth about the direction of the food, compensating for the changing position of the sun. And they did this, even though they were dancing inside the hive and therefore couldn’t see the sun. They were using their internal clocks to compensate for what they ‘knew’ would be the changing position of the sun.
Science in the Soul Page 33
